JUICE/RPWI in-flight operations support

The Radio & Plasma Wave Investigation (RPWI) with Jan-Erik Wahlund at IRF, as the Principal Investigator (PI), was selected by ESA in February 28, 2013, to implement one of the instrument packages for the ESA L-class mission JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) of ESA´s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme.

The RPWI consortium consist of over 20 international instrument groups who provide a long heritage record from several previous ESA/NASA/JAXA missions.

The JUICE launch is planned for September 2022 with arrival of the spacecraft at Jupiter in 2031, and a planned ending in 2036 after an orbital phase of the moon Ganymede.

Archiving of data will continue for a couple of years after that.The RPWI team have delivered all of the flight hardware, which has been successfully tested and integrated on the spacecraft.

A flight-hardware item (the FS SCM sensor) is waiting for a delivery for integration with the spacecraft before July 2021.

On-board and ground support software development is ongoing and will continue after launch.This application considers support for RPWI instrument operations during the cruise and science phases of the JUICE mission. It covers costs for operations and support for on-board and ground support software.

We outline here what is needed until JUICE mission end in 2036 + 2-years of archiving of data.The RPWI provides an elaborate set of state-of-the-art electromagnetic fields and cold plasma instrumentation, where several different types of sensors will sample the thermal plasma, DC electric fields, electric and magnetic signals from waves and micrometeorite impacts.

The list of science objectives is very long, but among the highlights are the capability to investigate how the sub-surface oceans and their ionospheres of the icy Galilean moons couple electro-dynamically to the highly variable Jovian magnetosphere, to fully characterize Jovian radio emissions and use them to carry out passive radar experiments to determine the depth of the ice layers, directly study in-situ the partly ionized gas exhaust water-rich plumes above the icy moons, and characterize the variability of Jupiter’s and Ganymede’s magnetospheres with time and response to external forcing.The RPWI data will be the basis for many years of frontline research for international and swedish researchers.